personal archiving

I’ve been using Pinterest for about two weeks now, and I’m finding the layout, access, and community rather intriguing. Up until this point I had been a devout Tumblr user, relishing in the ability to focus my energies on posting to, in simplistic terms, an online sticker book.

Pinterest provides me with the freedom to categorize my postings so that I can utilize the information within- something that it quite difficult in Tumblr without first providing the proper tags (and then remembering those tags later). It makes Tumblr the prefect entertainment tool, while introducing Pinterest as a utility. Example: Book cover designer friend using Pinterest for organizing her online inspirations, images, and typographic examples for future use.

One criticism I can offer (which might just be the nature of the beast itself) is my tendency to post purely visual items. Tumblr provides an avenue for textual links and posts, which are akin to blogs. Pinterest seems to be just that, a visual pinboard of images to remember.

Recently, there’s been rumblings about Copyright issues regarding how people post to Pinterest. For one viewpoint, and a bit of background published by The Verge, head over here.

With the sudden popularity of Pinterest, not only can you become your own online content curator, but you have the ability to archive that content into logical sections for future research and recall. Not only does this benefit your own knowledge-seeking, but the simplicity of the categories provided (and user-created) also speak to those searching your slice of the Interwebs for similar genres, subjects, and ideas.

Home archiving = (hopefully) a better appreciation for the field and practice at large!

UPDATE: Read a little bit more about Pinterest’s personal curation freedoms, along with some poignant ideas for teaching proper citations and description here, in an article on Tame the Web.